The Road to Amazing by Brent Hartinger

the other things I talked about, I can do them with him. If we do
disagree about something, we really will work it out."
    "Wow, I'm absolutely brilliant. So?
What's your rebuttal?"
    "I dunno," I said. "It seems too
optimistic. Aren't you the one who's always saying the whole world
is going to hell?"
    "Oh, sure, in the big picture, the
corporations and religious fundamentalists are going to screw us
all. But on a micro level, I still have faith."
    I laughed out loud. At this point, I
was back to liking how well Min knew me, that we really understood
each other.
    "I think I know what the problem is,"
Min said.
    "You usually do."
    Min ignored me. "You're afraid to grow
up. You're afraid of being an adult." She sighed. "Such a
Millennial."
    "I am not . I mean, I'm a Millennial, but
I'm not afraid of growing up. I'm already grown up. I'm twenty-five
years old!" I thought about it for a second. "I'm also sick to
death of the whole man-child thing. You know, that you see now in
almost every TV show and every movie? Yes, yes, you can't stay home
and drink beer and play video games all day, how incredibly tragic.
They seriously do need to grow up. But that's not what this is."
    Min kept ignoring me. "And that's what
marriage symbolizes: being an adult. So it stands to reason it's
giving you pause."
    I'm afraid to grow
up? I thought. That couldn't possibly be
right. Could it?
    It did have the ring of truth. Min was
actually pretty good at this, calling me on my shit. But it usually
all worked out in the end, because I'd been known to call her on
her shit too.
    "Just so we're clear," I
said, "I'm really not having second thoughts about the wedding. I
mean, like, at all ."
    "I know that."
    "We're just talking."
    "I know that too."
    "All that said," I said, "well, who
the hell wants to grow old? As far as I can tell, it's all about
not getting enough fiber, and ear wax removal systems, and cracked
crowns not being covered by insurance, and how you need some sort
of tool to scrape your tongue or you'll get bad breath. Oh, and
then you die."
    "There's a slight possibility you're
dwelling on the negative."
    "Not to hear my parents tell it. But
you want to know the worse part? They don't have friends, they have
dinner party guests. I don't know if they ever did, but they don't
now. It makes me so sad."
    "So you've said. But that's one thing
you're never going to have to worry about — not having friends. As
for the bad breath, well, that's a separate issue."
    "I want my life to be special," I
said.
    Now I really had gotten down to the
nub of it. It wasn't so much that I was worried about growing
older, or even that Kevin would one day announce that he
desperately wanted kids, so we'd have to work out some kind of
compromise and we'd end up getting a corgi.
    It was that the whole marriage thing
meant I was getting closer and closer to the point where I had to
either put up or shut up about the kind of life I was going to
live.
    "I'm being neurotic again," I said
glumly, "aren't I?"
    Min beamed. "In all honesty, these
might be the least neurotic feelings you've ever had."
    "Really?"
    "Really."
    We both fell silent, looking around at
the jagged foundations of the ruins around us. Now they reminded me
of shark fins sticking up from a roiling ocean of sword ferns. The
wind blew, and I smelled something stinky coming from the direction
of the beach — more than just seaweed.
    "So," she said, "what do you think
happened to them? The people of Amazing."
    "Really?" I said.
    "Are you kidding? A mystery involving
a deserted town? This is totally your kind of thing."
    Now I loved how well Min knew
me.
    "You know," I said, "it might surprise
you, but I'm back to seriously considering the possibility of alien
abduction."
    "I think I'm going with a
time vortex, like in that old episode of Star Trek . Can you not see it? The
vortex opens, and all the people come out to investigate, and then
they all get sucked into another dimension?"
    Right then, I got a